Dimitrios Giannakopoulos

DIMITRIOS GIANNAKOPOULOS, then a graduate student at University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece, was awarded funding in December 2021 to aid research on “Performing Informality in Rural Greece: Morality, Legitimacy and Belonging,” supervised by Dr. Vassilis Nitsiakos. The research focuses on the rural area of Agrinio, where all sorts of agricultural goods, from olive oil and dairy products to tobacco and alcohol, are informally produced and traded. Ordinary people participate massively, either as producers or consumers, avoiding taxation, but interreacting with establishment values and practices. The research findings depict informality not as a mere “distortion” of the economic activity, but as a social mindset, negotiated every day. The concept of “being part of” can significantly impact one’s fundamental assumptions about social life. Particular modes of belonging, informally constructed but publicly performed, result in a citizenship composed of multiple dimensions, sometimes convergent, but often contradictory. However, if informality has the tendency to undermine the system on which it is based, the same is true for populism. The research suggests that we should consider informality as an ordinarily recurrent event, a reflexive and potentially normative agency, through which ordinary people implement their conceptualizations on legitimacy, moderate economic uncertainty, and define who they are as a group.